Reviews

Day 2! How exciting. The happy Asian man seemed surprised I came back, too. He even unlocked a new game for me since I had two stamps.

I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do one task a day or many, but I’ve been doing all available tasks. To me, it just makes no sense to do this for a minute or so then wander off.

I did the same exercises I did yesterday plus the one he unlocked. I improved  a few of my scores and did worse on a few others. There’s one game in particular where you have to memorize the numbers then tap them in order from lowest to highest. The trick is that you’re only shown the numbers for a split second. I did drastically worse on this one, which leads me to believe that there must be some sort of environmental variable that makes a difference. We’ll see tomorrow!

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I decided to buy a Nintendo DS the other day because I wanted to try out Brain Age. Okay, so the real reason was because I wanted to play Pokemon, but that’s neither here nor there. Don’t judge me.

In any event, I figured I’d try this out to see what all the fuss was about. After reading a few reviews on the Internet, I found that this worked for some people but not others. I figured it was worth looking into, and I’ve decided to log my experience with it here. Will it prove anything? Maybe not.

When you first begin, you’re tasked with a short exercise that  determines your brain age. Mine was 64, and I was informed that my brain is tired. I can’t say I’m surprised since I work and go to grad school, but it should make a nice figure to do some benchmarking with. I was shown pictures of some brains to see which areas were active during some activities as well. All in all, it was a nice little introduction to what I’d be getting myself into.

There’s an Asian man (presumably the visage of the man who created this…thing) who guides you through the exercises. He’s jovial no matter what he says and I found it unsettling. No one is that happy. Not even smart people.

As I went through the exercises, I could feel my brain working. The tasks weren’t hard really, but it’s somewhat challenging to do them quickly and get them correct. I’m interested to see what the outcome is when I take the brain age test again in a week.

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